Last month we kicked off the first Dean's Speaker Series with John Holdren, President Obama's science and technology advisor for eight years. You can watch that archived video here.
As part of the speaker series, we also celebrated 15 years since the founding of Engineers Without Borders here at CU, which is now a worldwide organization with tens of thousands of members.
For this On CUE podcast, I got the opportunity to sit down and chat with Dr. Holdren about that, as well as the past, present and future of science and technology policy. I hope you enjoy it.
Nikki van Den Heever is a master's student in civil engineering and president of CU Boulder's chapter of Engineers Without Borders.
TRANSCRIPT
Announcer
And now from the University of Colorado in Boulder, the college engineering applied science presents: On CUE. Here's your host Phil Larson.
Phil Larson
So last month we celebrated 15 years since the founding of Engineers Without Borders which was founded here at CU. And so I wanted to sit down with you know our current president Nikki van den Heever to talk about engineers without borders. And we also had the opportunity to host President Obama's science adviser, he was science advisor to Obama for eight years and we had the inaugural dean speaker series as well. So Nikki got a chance to sit down with him, Dr. Holdren, and talk with him so just wanted to chat with Nikki a little bit before we turn the interview over to her and Dr. Holdren so Nikki thanks for joining us.
Nikki van den Heever
Thanks for having me today.
Larson
So first could you talk about your career here at CU, what you're studying and your current path.
van den Heever
Yeah absolutely. So, I am in the MSBS programs I did my undergrad in civil engineering and focus in water resources. But it's a five-year program where you get both your Bachelor's and Master's. And so right now I'm wrapping up the master's portion and studying civil systems and engineering for developing communities which is like engineers without borders and class.
Larson
So what got you excited about engineering and that particular form of engineering. As a kid.
van den Heever
Yes, I was, I hadn't considered engineering until like the last year of high school. I knew that I'd wanted to do something that was going to.. the cliché statement of helping people but I knew that I was really invested in low income areas and figuring out solutions and creative solutions to helping those areas and junior year my science teacher sat me down I was like I think engineering might be for you and I was like no way, I don't think so. And so after days of exploring I found this thing called humanitarian engineering which is like engineers without borders on this education farm and after looking at the technical practical application of that and seeing that engineering can be solving a lot of the solutions a lot of the problems that need solutions. I was totally bought in.
Larson
Amazing, so then you came to CU. And how did you learn about engineers without borders?
van den Heever
Yeah I actually came to CU because in part of engineers without borders so I knew coming in that this is exactly what I wanted to do, at the first career fair… not career fair but the first student group fair I targeted down engineers without borders and that's all I needed. The first day I was there and from there it was it's been fantastic and yes so I’ve done a lot of research about what EWB was and because in part it was founded here in the chapter here is so strong I knew that this is exactly what I wanted to do.
Larson
Now for someone who's not an engineer or doesn't know what engineers without borders does or is. Could you explain just like what it has accomplished how it has grown what it does and what it has done over the past 15 years.
van den Heever
Yea so I like to start by explaining or asking if people know at Doctors Without Borders is. And so it's the equivalent of that but in engineering and it's for students so doctors is for professionals. So we take our skills as engineers and put them into positive impact in low income areas and we're really proud that we kind of have this two pronged approach in making a positive impact in these low income communities. But then also giving our students phenomenal hands on opportunities to learn and practice their engineering skills in a in a real world setting.
Larson
What kind of projects?
van den Heever
So right now our big focus is water. We do a lot of water resources projects but we work in four different areas so we work in Nepal Peru Paraguay and Rwanda and three of those projects are currently in water and then ones in hygiene.
Larson
And so you say water is it like drilling wells? You know getting fresh water to communities?
van den Heever
Yeah yea, so one of our projects is drilling wells and it has a storage system with distribution but we also do rain water catchment in Rwanda because drilling isn't an option there. And then we do spring source protection in Peru. So, kind of the whole gambit of collection, filtration, distribution, maintenance.
Larson
So, 15 years ago you know we all love Professor Bernard Amadei who helped found this here at CU, how has it grown? What are the numbers like today?
van den Heever
It’s... he explains it as filling a vacuum that was needed. And so, engineering students that are interested in community impact didn't have an outlet to kind of put their skills into use and this was that solution. And so from the five initial students that he started with it's now we've got 16000+ involved and engaged student members. And we work in it's like 600 plus community projects and we include involve professional engineers and student engineers and it's a wide ranging network and I think that we're continuing to expand. I think this vacuum is something that continues to evolve and engage people..
Larson
And there’s chapters around the world it sounds like?
van den Heever
Yes yes yes. So, USA but there also EWB international organizations as well and each have their own chapters.
Larson
Amazing. OK so we celebrated the 15 years in November with the inaugural Dean speaker series Obama's science adviser was here. You know we had a chance other than you know just the speech and the fireside chat. He got to spend some time with you and with your student colleagues could you talk about you know that kind of interacting with him and what that whole day was like?
van den Heever
It was phenomenal. Our students were so thrilled to be able to meet someone that had really embraced the impact that science and technology can have on communities and they were really excited to see his dedication to education and everything that he had done for education. And I really enjoyed being able to hear about his impact on policy. I'm really excited about the future of science and policy and my personal researches and how we can better make decisions based kind of movements in policy and how we can better use science and technology to inform those decisions. And I think Dr. Holdren has done exactly that years of experience and I think how positively he portrayed everything. In spite of inside those he explained having grenades thrown in his door in the morning having to deal with problems I think it was just really inspiring to see to see the impact that he was able to have.
Larson
Could you talk about you know the event we had you know how many dollars were raised what kind of things happened there.
van den Heever
Yeah absolutely. So we had the reception after the speaker series where Dr. Holdren joined us and we had about 200 outside guests join us to celebrate EWB and kind of do this fundraiser to help us continue funding our projects moving forward and so we ended up making about 14000 which was then matched from a grant here on campus which we are absolutely thrilled with and we're very grateful for the support from the college to make it happen. But hearing his speech there about what he'd seen about EWB here he seemed to be really excited about where it was going and its impact on future students. That comment was really exciting for us to hear.
Larson
And you got to do this with, we had you know you're the first guest host first student host of our CU engineering podcast what was it like to interview him?
van den Heever
That was nerve wracking. I was a little nervous. I had all my questions ready and I was I had thought through what I wanted to ask and as we were asking them things are coming to my mind that are new and it was just it was a discussion and he's so humble and he made me so comfortable that as soon as he got into it it was it was just it was like having conversation with one of the most interesting people I talked with.
Larson
Awesome, let's listen to that now. Thank you so much for joining us here and for being our first student guest host. So, let's listen to your conversation with Dr. Holden now. Thanks for joining us.
van den Heever
Thanks so much for having me.
van den Heever
We are here with John Holdren, President Obama’s past science adviser to get his insight into the current event of things going on in science in relation to some of the things going on here at CU. My first question for you is what was your favorite part of working with Obama in his administration doing the science advising any of those topics.
John Holdren
Well it was a privilege and a great delight to work with President Obama because he understood how and why is science technology and innovation matter to everything else on his agenda. He understood how they mattered to the economy to public health to national security to energy and climate change. And was extraordinarily interested and welcoming of ideas that would help move the needle on all these other aspects of the national agenda. And so being his science and technology adviser getting to meet with him regularly to discuss real ideas that could move the needle on all of these issues that matter to the welfare of the American people and in many cases the welfare of the people of the world. You just couldn't ask for any more exciting and rewarding job.
van den Heever
That's I mean that's phenomenal. Climate change is something that you focused on pretty substantially within his administration. And I'm wondering if you can touch on that intersect between climate change and community development. EWB is a lot of community development and we've mentioned that that has to have some overlays that I would love to hear your thoughts about.
Holdren
Sure. Well first of all the causes and the dynamics of climate change are global but all of the impacts are local and the most vulnerable groups to the local impacts of climate change are for the most part in developing countries and within industrialized nations that are the poorest communities that are most at risk. And so if we want to provide the information and the services that will enable these vulnerable communities to cope with the impacts of climate change then we've got to engage with them and we have to bring engineering to bear on these communities in intelligent ways. We have to think about development not as something that is somehow at odds with dealing with climate change but something that we need to pursue in a way that is recognizing climate change and building into the development process resilience and preparedness against those changes in climate that we're no longer able to avoid. I often say that facing the challenges of climate change human society has only three choices; mitigation the things you do to reduce the pace and magnitude of climate change largely emissions reductions but also increase, adaptation the things you do to reduce the impacts of the changes that do occur and the third option is suffering. And if we want to minimize the suffering, as we should. We're going to have to maximize both mitigation and adaptation. And the biggest adaptation challenges are going to be for the developing countries and the poorer communities in our country.
van den Heever
Yeah love that, I think that's so important and that's addressing resiliency and risk is something that EWB really focuses on. And we talked a little bit about it earlier but I'm wondering if you can just touch briefly on again the importance of having our young engineers be interested in a global approach to development and engineering and science. And what should be inspiring or upcoming STEM students?
Holdren
Well I've always thought that science and technology are the keys to sustainable development. And what I mean by sustainable development is improving the human condition in ways and to points that are consistent with maintaining those improvements indefinitely. And this is a task in human relations a task in economics. But above all is a task for engineers it's the task in technology and getting these young engineers engaged in this and working in some of the most needful communities in the world working in Nepal and Peru and Rwanda and seeing the results of their work firsthand. Giving them firsthand understanding of doing things that matter. That improves peoples… things that improve people's lives. I mean this is just indispensable as a part of training the generation of engineers that we need to help address the world's problems. So I just think what engineers without borders is doing is fabulous. You know one of the things we discovered when we looked at. Science technology engineering and math education in American universities and asked ourselves why do only 40 percent of the kids who enter college intending to get a degree in a STEM field science technology engineering or math. Why do only 40 percent end up getting those degrees? One of the reasons is that they're not given enough opportunities as undergraduates to get their hands on real world problems to see the importance of what they're learning. The applications of what they're learning to problems where they can actually make people's lives better and the fact that engineers without borders is providing that. And providing it not just here at CU but all around the country. And I think around the world. This is a tremendous contribution both to the process of addressing those problems out of the world but to the education of these young engineers.
van den Heever
Thank you that's very kind. We're really proud of those two things that we offer. Thank you. Thank you very much. I've talked to some of the people that you know here and friends that you worked with in the past and the resounding comment is that you're very passionate about what you do and that you love this field. And I'm wondering if you can touch on why you care so much about what you do.
Holdren
Well I actually decided what I wanted to do when I was in high school. When I read two books that would change the whole trajectory of my career one of those books was C.P. Snow's book The Two Cultures. C.P. Snow was a British philosopher and mathematician who argued that many of the world's most interesting intractable and important problems were sitting in the gulf between the culture of science and engineering on the one hand and the culture of social science and humanities on the other and that we needed more people who were conversant with both cultures and could effectively address these enormous problems of the human condition that sat in between these two in the second book I read was a book called The Challenge of Man's Future. Written in 1954 when you could write man's future without hesitation. If the author had written that later he would have written the challenge of the human future. But this was a book by Harrison Brown a geochemist who had worked in the Manhattan Project in World War II and it was a book that argued that the problems that the world faces in population resources environment development and security were all intertwined. All interdisciplinary all international all intergenerational and they would only be solved if they were all solved together that we could not take a piecemeal approach to these issues and he argued that, C.P. Snow did, doing that was going to require contributions from the natural sciences from engineering from economics from law and I decided after reading those two books that these are the kinds of problems I want to work on because they are intellectually demanding they're interesting and yet they offer an opportunity to improve the human condition. And everything I've done since has been aimed at doing that and I've had a terrific career doing that. I mean one of the things that you come to conclude is you're not going to solve all these problems in your lifetime. And some people will argue that some of them are not soluble at all. But if you just went out and smell the flowers and went fishing you couldn't feel good about yourself when you knew that there were opportunities to work. On addressing these problems even if you don't believe that they're are all going to be solved in your lifetime. That has been my attitude the whole time and I've had remarkable opportunities the opportunity to work for President Obama as his science adviser and the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. For somebody who cares about those problems. National security and nuclear arms control and non-proliferation climate change energy science and technology for economic development. One couldn't have a greater opportunity than to work for a president of the United States who understood both the importance of science and technology to all of these issues and the interconnections among them. So, I got real lucky.
van den Heever
That’s I think that's a phenomenal experience and your career track has just been so inspiring students here. I'm wondering if you can shed light on how you get policymakers to listen to the data? How do you use data and numbers and science to convince or show trends or demonstrate to policymakers the importance of whatever issue you’re addressing?
Holdren
That is a really good question because it depends so much on the openness of the policymaker to being influenced by evidence to being influenced by analysis being influenced by argument. And again I had the good fortune of working for a policymaker our top policymaker. President Barack Obama, who was extraordinary in that respect. Extraordinary in his respect for facts his respect for analysis his ability to listen and absorb and synthesize and then apply to the problems at hand what he knew about science and technology what he learned from his advisers and what he knew from other aspects of the problem could be brought together with science and technology to think about solutions. I was really fortunate in that way not every science adviser to a president of the United States has been that fortunate. I was also a member of the president's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology in the Clinton administration in the 90s and President Clinton and his Vice President Al Gore were also very interested in facts analysis evidence open to argument and in fact it was through argument and analysis and facts presented to President Clinton by Vice President Gore as well as by me and other members of the Council of Advisors on Science and Technology that President Clinton became persuaded to make climate change a big priority toward the end of his administration. He didn't start out that way but he looked at the evidence. He looked at the analysis he listened to the arguments and he embraced it. And as a result we went to Kyoto we signed the Kyoto Protocol could never get it ratified. His successor George W. Bush was much less interested in evidence arguments analysis facts. And that issue of climate change unfortunately became very politicized and fact seemed to matter less ideology seemed to matter more. That has persisted. We did everything we could in the Obama administration to address climate change in an energetic and forward leaning way in a cost effective way in a way that would benefit the economy not hurt the economy. But the Congress wouldn't go along after the 2010 elections when both houses ended up in the hands of the Republicans and the issue would become so politicized that in my judgment even many Republicans who know in their hearts that climate change is real and humans are causing it and it's already doing damage and we need to do something about it for reasons of party unity and ideological purity. They don't want to admit it. And this is a real problem in our society and it speaks about other things too the shortfalls in science engineering and math education where it seems to me that starting in K through 12 we try to fill kids with too many facts and we don't give them an adequate sense of what science is how it works how engineering and technological advance are based on science how peer review works what the sources of credibility are in science and so we have this situation where a few voices who apparently for ideological reasons deny the obvious about climate change can somehow be obstacles to taking the kinds of steps that we should be taking to address this enormous challenge. The challenge at the intersection of climate change and energy strategy.
van den Heever
Yeah I think that's something that we're working on in terms of getting data to be at the forefront of decision making as well just in with our own small spheres.
Holdren
And that's something that we did very explicitly in the Obama administration with the Open Data Initiative where we opened up literally hundreds of thousands of government databases to the public in electronically searchable form so that people could not only get easy access to information relevant to their interests and their concerns but that companies could make valuable products based on this information. Of course we've long known how to do that in the area of weather forecasting where the National Weather Service, it's part of no other National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration provides the data and private companies make use of it and communicated to the public in ways that are transparent and useful. You know the weather channel, where's the weather channel to get their data? They get their data from the National Weather Service. And we decided we could do that in many other areas that this area where government data. Gets used in the private sector to improve human well-being is something we can see a lot more of. And so now we have data.gov hundreds of thousands of government databases. We have in the Obama we did in the Obama administration have a whole set of programs designed to help people access what the government knows what the government has done and it can help them in their lives beyond just now when I was earlier in my career I used to go visit the Government Printing Office all the time.
The physical Government Printing Office where all these government reports were available and I would just go nuts in the Government Printing Office I would go home with arms full of Government Printing Office volumes of Statistical Abstract of the United States it no longer even exists in hard copy but you can find all those data online. I mean this is an enormously valuable resource that we now have that everybody has and we built it up in the Obama administration new domain of climate change. We have the climatedata.gov which is all the government's data relating to climate change that communities and businesses and individual’s farmers and fishermen can use to understand what's happening in their region. What's happening to their economic sector and take appropriate action. You can't do that. You can't adapt you can't prepare you can't build resilience without knowing what's happening and what's likely to happen. And we have that now with climatedata.gov with the climate resilience toolkit which Noah continues to maintain which makes these data even more user friendly. And basically pairs these data with case studies of successful strategies of climate change adaptation preparedness and resilience. This gets back to your original question about what can you do to ensure that the most vulnerable people the most vulnerable places have the information they need to adapt to climate change. Very important.
van den Heever
I think I mean I think as a young aspiring engineer that having those data resources is phenomenal. I think one of the other initiatives that you've been really powerful in is creating a space for everyone to get involved. At EWB we're really proud that we have about a 50/50 split in men and women and I'm wondering if you could just talk about your work in the initiatives of kind of doing and building a diverse space for everyone to get involved in the conversation.
Holdren
That's a great question and thank you for asking it because President Obama believed very strongly that in the STEM fields it was particularly important to build opportunities to build inspiration to build mentoring and support for girls and women in STEM fields for underrepresented minorities African-Americans Hispanics Native Americans. Because as President Obama said you can't win the game with half your team on the bench. And as a result of that interest that President Obama had in building up our STEM capabilities by harnessing the enormous talent in in these groups in the female half of the population in the minorities within our population we had many many initiatives on inclusion. We had initiatives that brought scientists engineers mathematicians who were women are underrepresented minorities into classrooms all across the United States to talk about their work K through 12 classrooms to talk about their work what they did the excitement of it so that kids can see that people who look like them can have exciting rewarding productive impactful careers in science technology engineering and math. We did a lot with the historically black colleges and universities to provide support and more opportunities for them to lift their games to improve their capacities. And I think we had a lot of success at that and we are seeing if you look at the data we are seeing increases in the number of women earning STEM degrees we are seeing increases in the number of women earning science degrees engineering has actually been the slowest to come along.
And we need to do more work to increase the number of girls who become interested in engineering and women who become engineers. I'm particularly delighted to know that the University of Colorado already has 38 percent women among its STEM students and is aiming for 50 percent. The College of Engineering. This is great and you're to be congratulated. Maybe you can get President Obama to come here and congratulate you because it's something that has been very important for him.
van den Heever
And as a final question and thank you so much for your time today. Do you have any words of wisdom for aspiring scientists and people in the STEM field that want to make a difference and kind of follow the footsteps that you've had or new STEM students going out into the world if you had to.
Holdren
I would say two things. To young people embarked on these kinds of trajectories. The first one is do what you're passionate about because people do their best work they deliver their best results when they're working on something they really care about. So, look for positions and if you can't find a position figure out how to create one in which you can do what you are really passionate about to apply your skills. What other engineering skills are physical science skills or math skills or economic skills or public policy skills to important problems. The second thing I would say is don't be discouraged by the degree to which the current political environment in the United States appears to be to some extent fact averse. This will pass and we will again get to a point where we have the top leadership of the United States interested in facts analysis evidence and basing their policies on facts and analysis and evidence. The current situation is sometimes looks pretty discouraging in that respect but it will pass and facts and evidence and analysis will win out.
van den Heever
Thank you so much for your time today we really appreciate your insight.
Holdren
Very happy to do it. Thank you. Thanks for joining us.
Announcer
This has been on CUE for more information visit Colorado.edu/engineering.
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